Sunday, January 24, 2016

Work Becomes the Idol

Scattered thoughts on Steve Jobs written a few years ago when 2 biopics were planned and I was hearing a lot of love for the late Apple guru at my job.

The man who created a phone where you can talk to yourself,
the man perhaps most responsible for crippling consciousness to the point where
teens now human sacrifice themselves en masse so that they don’t have to pay
attention to driving for five minutes.
And then people praise him for his vision. The religious leader of
capitalism, the Christ figure who delivered us from ourselves, who plugged us
directly into the matrix.

His Stanford Commencement speech is porn for the privileged,
inspirational claptrap as selfie, a passed hors d’oeuvres tray of 140 character
bits wisdoms. The ideology of the gilded class is that everything is fine, that
you only need to follow your dreams and believe in yourself and things will
work out for you the way it statistically is almost guaranteed to not. They preach this with such vigor, you could
almost buy that they believe it. Maybe they even do. It doesn’t really matter.
The important part is that we don’t believe it, but that we act like we
do. If we believed it, we’d be wildly
disappointed. We’d be a country
suffering from pandemic levels of depression and anxiety that our dreams were
not coming true. But that’s not us,
we’re America the bold and the beautiful, with dicks and guns so big that other
countries deliver their talent to us, prop up our faux democracies, negotiate
peace treaties on our terms, and praise our computer prodigies for their
ingenuity.

We believe in the dream. We follow it, and when we filter
down the most pragmatic dreams to the one standing in front of us putting food
on our table and keeping the disgusting habits of the underclasses out of our
way, we realign our dreams. We make the
dream what we have, what we own. Every knock
to our stability, every caveat, every cancer cell and its corresponding
invoice, is the price paid. Because
dreams aren’t just dreamed, they’re purchased.
Those who can afford it can have great ones, but the rest of them at
least get a piece. America the great bargain.

The dream of course is finding satisfaction in work. No one dreams of finding satisfaction in
love, in family, in leisure. Those
things are naturally pleasurable. You don’t have to dream them, they happen.
Work becomes the idol, living in praise of work, in praise of Jobs.

They’d have you believe that we’re still in the garden and
the snake is selling something at the Apple Store, the best-selling item of all time, a narrative, an autobiography, an i. iDream. & iDream. &iDream.